“Where’s Your Shoes?” An Urban Spiritual Practice

It was a hot August afternoon. I was walking home from work at the hospital when a minivan pulled up behind and started following me.

I was barefoot.

I’d pulled off my shoes and socks as soon as I’d walked out the revolving door at the hospital entrance, stuffed them in my backpack, and stepped off the sidewalk into the damp earth and cool grass. I’d enjoyed the instant grounding sensation and felt like a natural human being again, blinking in real sunlight after a long day walking hospital corridors under fluorescent lights. I could smell the land and hear the birds again.

And now I was being followed by a minivan in broad daylight.

“Excuse me, sir?” The driver motioned me to the window. A woman.

I looked around. Women never do this.

“Do you need some shoes?” she says.

“What?” I said. “No, thank you.”

“I have some right here,” she says, “They’re almost new.”

“No, I don’t need any shoes.”

“Really, its no problem! I’d like to give them to you!”

“I have shoes in my backpack,” I said. “Thank you.”

“They are too big for my son, but I’m sure they’d fit you!”

“I’m fine, really, thank you.”

“But you don’t have any shoes!”

“I don’t want any shoes,” I say. “I like walking barefoot.”

The woman gave me a blank look. The blank look changed to an expression of deep concern. Then discomfort.

She drove off.

Hello. My name is Jeff. (Hi Jeff.) I’m a barefoot walker. I also run barefoot, but that’s another story.

Walking barefoot has revealed a lot to me about the hidden rules of American life. Rule 74: You have the right to bear a truckload of firearms, text while driving, listen to talk radio, and other crazy stuff. But you do not have the right to walk barefoot in the city. Seriously. Try it sometime. You’ll see what happens.

Here’s a few of the actual reactions I’ve received:

“Hey mister, where’s your shoes?” (Neighborhood kids.)

“Doesn’t that hurt?” (A woman in high heels.)

“Don’t you step on glass?” (No. And yes. See below.)

“The ground is dirty.” (There are a hundred thousand more bacteria per square inch on your kitchen sink sponge than on the ground. Seriously. You can look it up.)

“Eww! Gross!” (Teenager with piercings on face and other body parts.)

“My feet are too ugly to go barefoot.” (Women say this.)

A mother watches me suspiciously as I walk past her toddler on the sidewalk. The toddler is wearing fifty-dollar Stride Rite shoes. The toddler smiles at me. The mother does not.

Only one person got it. An elderly black woman dragging a trash barrel to the curb straightened up and watched me approach. She looked at my feet, smiled and gave me a knowing look . “Mmm hmm,” she nodded, “I know about that.” My heart opened as I walked away, recognizing this rare and deep connection with a total stranger.

I began walking barefoot two years ago. I was reading Zen Heart by Ezra Bayda, in which he shared a short walking meditation from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. You recite it to yourself while walking very slowly, at a wandering-the-park pace:

“As I walk the mind will wander/ With each sound the mind returns/ With each breath the heart is open/ With each step I touch the earth.”* (Repeat)

This meditation does it all: it 1. returns your mind to the present moment, 2. opens your heart, and 3. gets you grounded. Since I had ridden my bicycle to work that day, I pushed it on the way home and began slowly repeating, “As I walk/ the mind will wander…” When I got to the last line, “With each step/ I touch the earth” the mass of the entire earth lifted slightly to meet my right foot. Then, it rose ever so lightly to meet my left foot. Right foot (pushhh)…left foot (pushhh)…

I was astounded. For those brief moments, with each step, I felt met by the Earth. Supported. Held up. I was walking in the street — by the curb on Lindsey Ave. amid the beer bottles and sodden Newport Menthol packages — but under all that battered asphalt, iron and heaving concrete awaited the Earth. Ancient and alive, it seemed.

I looked around. Had anyone noticed me standing still in the street holding a bicycle? People have a low tolerance for contemplation around here: I once was down on my knees looking at a tiny blue flower poking through the sidewalk. When I looked up several people were staring at me unsure whether to call the police or an ambulance. Folks around here saunter, strut, shout and curse in the middle of the street all the time. That’s normal. What’s not normal is a white guy in dress pants standing in the the street looking at his feet.

Anyway, I was hooked. The next day I left the bicycle at home. I had recently read Born to Run, the 2009 bestseller that sparked a shoeless revolution in the running world. So after work I peeled off my shoes and socks for the walk home. My tender, overprotected pale soles met real earth, pebbles and concrete- ooch eech ouch– and the first hundred yards exploded with sensation and stimulation.

But then a funny thing happened, as if my brain was adjusting the volume of sensory signals down to a more reasonable level: the tenderness largely went away. I began to recite the walking meditation and experienced the same earth-rising-to-meet-my-feet. But in bare feet I experienced particular textures, objects, temperatures and dry/dampness.

This kind of present-moment focus is exactly the consciousness sought by meditators and contemplatives worldwide. The thisness of the moment. This concrete is rough and hard. That grass is cool and soft. This sandy-gravelly alley dirt is also hard but…hmm, softer. That sidewalk in October is cold, this asphalt in July is hot but the grass in any month is comfortable and welcoming. (Try barefoot on grass the morning after a frost. Wow.)

Yes, you say, I know all this. Concrete is hard, grass is soft. Big whoop. But you don’t experience it, do you? Ever? The difference between knowledge and direct experience is, Oh look: a mud puddle to stomp in. (Mud skooshes between my toes.) God, I haven’t done this since I was nine years old. What’s different as an adult is the conscious yes of connecting directly with Mother Earth.

In seminary days I learned that the biblical name Adam comes from adamah, ancient Hebrew for earth. The “Adam” in Genesis (from the Hebrew, ha adam) translates straightforwardly as earth-creature. I get it now. As the native American medicine-wheel prayer teaches, humans embody the seventh direction: spirit and earth, mother-earth-walking.

Barefoot walking is a simple, convenient, heart-opening spiritual practice that uses our feet as connective soul bridges between body, mind and planet Earth. Barefoot walking with mindfulness raises consciousness. And raising consciousness in urban life is critical to sustaining the planet.

Okay. I wrote this to share the enjoyment, but also to address three common reactions I get from people about barefoot walking (or running).

Don’t you step on glass/nails? 1. No. Because when you walk barefoot you have to watch where you’re walking. You really have to pull your attention atoms back into your body and concentrate on your surroundings. This is a spiritual practice: presence. “Just this. ” Not chatting on the cell, planning a meeting or daydreaming. 2. Yes. I do occasionally step on sharp or hard objects. In the inner city I probably step on tiny pieces of glass all the time. But here’s the thing: when you walk barefoot regularly, your feet get tougher. You don’t get cut by the little stuff. You see the circular wisdom. Tender, shod feet stay weak and vulnerable. Bare feet get stronger and more resilient.

(Disclosure: I do stub my toes from time to time when trail running barefoot in the woods – I’ve had to learn to pick my feet up on the ever-changing terrain, after a lifetime of dull habits on utterly flat roads and sidewalks. And it’s very important to ease slowly into a barefoot lifestyle, particularly with running. The body can adapt to almost anything…over time.)

Our bodies have a natural immune system that existed long before antibiotics and big Pharma. Similarly, we have a natural foot-protection system that existed long before orthotics and padded shoes. For example, when I’m running trails and step on an unseen root or sharp stone my foot instinctively collapses over the stone like a pizza dough dropped over a rock and my weight shifts to the other foot. This split-second correction is local: it occurs at the foot level. My “mind” has nothing to do with it because it happens too fast. But wearing padded shoes deactivates this localized foot-intelligence and results in dull-minded weak feet.

The modern foot is just sad. It is like those feeble egg-industry chickens that live flightless lives in wire cages just to lay thin-shelled eggs for us and die. One barefoot colleague calls most shoes “plastic foot coffins”.

Conversely, the most amazing feet I’ve ever seen were those of a Ugandan hospital patient I worked with, a woman whose barefoot village lifestyle gave her powerful, splayed, muscular toes, calves of steel and soles so thick she could walk on gravel with a load of water or firewood that would cripple most Americans. Yet her feet were not hard, cracked, injured or scaly. They were pliable, lustrous, alive and beautiful.

The worst feet I’ve seen? Every day: the grotesque pale, inflamed, blistered, bone-skewed joints I see in American women’s feet after years of walking in dress shoes and heels. That‘s weird.

BTW: There is an entire field of valuable body/energy work involving pointed pressure to the soles of the feet called reflexology. You’ve heard about this. As a massage therapist, clients ask me about reflexology all the time: do I believe in it? Does it work? Sure it works. But you don’t have to pay a certified Reflexologist to experience deep sole-work. Just try walking around barefoot for a while on varying surfaces. Its a free reflexology session from Mother Earth.

Won’t you hurt your feet?/ I have bad feet. In the bestseller Born to Run, author Christopher McDougall visits the Tarahumara, an indigenous Mexican people known for their mythic ability to run distances of 100 miles or more wearing only thin sandals.** By comparison, McDougall notes the explosion of U.S. foot, knee and hip injuries since the 1970’s, when Nike began marketing the modern padded “waffle shoe” to runners. These new heel-lifting shoes altered the gait of runners by forcing an unnatural heel-strike landing that sends a whopping hammer impact up the skeleton to the skull with each step. We consider this whap-whap gait normal now, having forgotten how lightly we ran as children in bare feet.

McDougall’s message: if you want to heal foot injuries, take your shoes off. Allow your feet to use all the available structures (26 bones, 33 joints and more than a hundred muscles, tendons and ligaments) for walking and running. Like the full power of your calf muscles to smoothly lower your heels to the ground with each step.

A testimonial from one of my massage clients, Kathy RN:

“I tried varous podiatric treatments for 3 years, but was never able to get free from the pain of an old stress fracture. Out of desperation, I decided to shed my stiff, supportive shoes and orthotics and give barefoot shoes a try. I did need to carefully wean into wearing the barefoot shoes, but within two weeks I was wearing them for my twelve-hour shifts as a nurse, and the pain that had been my constant companion was gone! I have since worn them at work and at home, and am very happy with the results. When I wear barefoot shoes, I am lighter on my feet, more aware of the surfaces I am walking on, and feel more steady. I am so glad that I tried this style of shoe.”

But you have high arches, you say? Good! So do I. The arch is the foot’s natural shock absorber: the higher, the better. An arch is the strongest structural design known to builders from Ancient Rome to the St. Louis Arch. The stone blocks of a well-built archway, or the snow blocks of a family-sized Eskimo igloo do not even need connective mortar to work. Yet the best way to weaken an arch? Push it up from below (i.e. arch “supports”).

You begin to see the power of the shoe industry to bend common sense and even biomechanical function right out of our lives. Money is made on shoe sales and painful feet, not strong and healthy feet. A “high” arch is a problem only for the ill-fitting products of standardized dress- and athletic shoe companies.

I Might Step on the Earth

There’s a deeper question in all this barefoot talk, I think. The issue is not, won’t I step on something painful or icky. The deeper question is, won’t I step on the Earth? The shoes that distort our bodies’ feeling and function also disconnect us from the earth. We do not think about this, working in our offices behind non-opening windows, perched high above the earth in steel-girder structures encased in concrete. We sleep and move in climate controlled homes and vehicles where we have to look at an instrument to know the temperature outside. There’s more of submarine or spaceship about our lifestyle than mother nature, it seems.

Conversely, there’s something primal, damp, sensual and connective about walking on the earth. Something of mystery. This is the thing I love about it: it redirects my abstract concerns. It plugs my attention into something much greater and more live-giving than the ridiculous flock of worries my mind generates.

I stumble out of my back door in the morning, half in the dream world and half hounded by the storm of anxieties rising in my head. But the minute I get my feet on the ground in the backyard? Bam. Here! Now! Aho! Plugged into real time. The flock of distractions disappear and then there I am, surrounded by What’s Really Going On: a rising sun, a biting wind, a cloudy sky, barking alley dogs, redbud blossoms, dew, snow, frost, the damn woodchuck eating my flowers, unmowed grass. Mushrooms over here; dog turds over there. I’m alive, in nature and participating in it. Just another creature, ha adam. Connected to the Source like all the other creatures above and below.

We get so alienated from the natural world that we can forget how to recognize a close friend when it is lying right under our feet. We are like some of my inner city neighbors who never come outside or answer their door, isolated behind covered windows and receiving their information only from television and cell phones.

We’re at a real crossroads now with mother earth, and need to change our relationship to her. Recycling newspapers and buying hybrid cars isn’t going to do it, because the mindset behind these well-intended changes still treats the planet as a commodity, a sort of gravel pit of resources for humans to plunder. We don’t need different ways to pillage the planet. We need different humans. A more evolved humanity that sees the ecological and spiritual implications of living as creatures in a much greater web of life all around us.

Fortunately, the treatment for our nature-dissociation is right underneath our feet. Reconnecting with the earth from which our food comes, the four legged and the many legged, the winged ones, the waters, the mineral spirits, the life. When you open an I-Thou relationship with the earth, you learn there’s a lot more underfoot than glass and bacteria.

There is a lot of trash and trauma on the earth. And this is painful and necessary to experience firsthand with every barefoot step. But there is also a living spiritual connection to our Source, and all our relations. That real estate out there? It can heal you.

So. Take your shoes off, go for a slow walk, and prepare to be amazed.

25 thoughts on ““Where’s Your Shoes?” An Urban Spiritual Practice”

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I am so grateful to have happened upon your thoughts about walking barefoot. In my meditations and prayers lately I have been directed toward feet. I don’t understand it yet, what it means, what I am do do about it, all I know is that my attention is drawn toward feet. Images come to me: my childhood spent mostly barefoot, including running barefoot in the Panamanian jungle (my father was in the Marine Corps and we were stationed in the Canal Zone for 2 years). I knew there were poisonous snakes, spiders, caterpillars, thorns, but I was completely fearless. My middle child started walking at age 9 months and refused to walk in shoes, even in winter, in Iowa. If I put shoes on her, she would immediately plop down on her bottom and glare at the shoes. When my son was a toddler I would take off his shoes and kiss his little feet, and one day he gently pulled off my shoes and kissed my feet. I think about the story of Mary anointing the feet of Jesus, and of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples. There is something deeply spiritual about our feet, they carry us through our lives. I am very curious where these meditations of mine are going to lead me. Thanks again for your writing. Peace.

Wow- that’s beautiful, Brenda. Such an image, of your children refusing shoes, kissing bare feet, the Gospel accounts. I spent the day today leading a workshop for middle-school teachers on the benefits of barefoot, and a barefoot walking meditation- they looked at me like I was nuts at first. But slowly warmed up to the idea. Yes: keep your attention on your feet-meditations. They will lead you forward, one step at a time 😉

“Where are your shoes?”
Situationes when strangers insist to give you a pair of those…

I had that many times and it still makes me feel uncomfortable.
I’m on a round the world trip by bicycle since years and hardly wear shoes when I cycle or spend my time in villages. I sometimes walk barefoot in cities as well, but still not reached the total confidence not to care about the people who stare. In a shopping mall in Singapure for example ;-).

I often have the thought: “I would love to be barefoot now but it would be to weird/rude/complicated”
For me the topic is connected to many emotions…
…but it should be the most natural thing!

Do you also have this conflict sometimes, even though you practice a barefoot lifestyle for a long time?

Hi Astrid, thank you for your comment and question. What an adventure you have been on with your world bicycle tour! Where are you right now? (I just purchased a “Bob trailer” pull-behind bicycle trailer for my bike, which I plan to use in the Texas desert this winter doing some off-road bike camping. Wish me luck.)
Yes, it is difficult when people stare and immediately assume there is something wrong or even psychologically unstable about you, if you make the radial act of taking off your shoes and walking on (shiver) the ground. I am helped by a Mexican Toltec teaching from Don Miguel Ruiz, author of the book, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom. The second agreement is, “Don’t take anything personally.” That sounds really simplistic, but the deep wisdom behind that is that nothing anyone else does or says to you is every about you: it is about their belief system, anxieties and the “trance” of conventional social rules that people live with. You can smile, take your shoes off, and know that you are quietly disturbing some pretty irrational and health-blocking beliefs around you. One of the more heart-breaking experiences I have is not adults, but when small children in my neighborhood, who would naturally be running around barefoot in the summer heat, are clunking around in hot, heavy shoes when its 90 degrees out, because momma isn’t comfortable in her own bare feet. Ideally, these encounters could be a brief but real teachable moment for others, if and when the occasional person is curious enough to engage with you and hear your experience.
Blessings on your continued world bike tour, and keep your feet to the earth! – Jeff

I’m 55 years old to start going barefoot woods I love it I Carry my shoes just in case Now I go barefoot I still get crazy looks I’m proud to be a barefoot People don’t realize what they’re missing Many Americans are Afraid to Get their feet dirty Go barefoot the woods is very peaceful